Posts from December 2007

December 19, 2007

The declaration from something called the Handmade Consortium materialized on a Web site called
buyhandmade.org in late
October. "I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season, and request
that others do the same for me," it said, and you could type in your
name to "sign" on; within a few weeks, more than 6,500 people had done
so. "Buying handmade is better for people," a statement on the site
read in part, and "better for the environment," because mass production
is a "major cause" of global warming, among other things. There were links to an anti-sweatshop site and a Wal-Mart watchdog site.

The pledge echoed the idealistic language of a tree-hugger activist
group, but actually the consortium's most prominent member was the
online shopping bazaar Etsy, a very much for-profit entity that bills
itself as "your place to buy & sell all things handmade." Etsy does
not fulfill orders from an inventory; it's a place where sellers set up
virtual storefronts, giving the site a cut of sales. While eBay rose to
prominence nearly a decade ago as an endless garage sale for the
auctioning of collectibles and bric-a-brac, Etsy is more of an online
craft fair, or art show, where the idea is that individuals can sell
things that they have made. How many such people can there be? At last
count, more than 70,000 — about 90 percent of whom were women — were
using Etsy to peddle their jewelry, art, toys, clothes, dishware,
stationery, zines and a variety of objects from the mundane to the
highly idiosyncratic. Each seller has a profile page telling shoppers a
bit about themselves, and maybe offering a link to a blog or a MySpace page or a mailing list; most have devised some clever store or brand name for whatever they’re selling.

Maybe
you're interested in a "random music generator" called the Orb of Sound
($80), built by an Australian tinkerer calling himself RareBeasts. Or a
whistle made out of a tin can and bottle caps ($12), by loranscruggs,
near Seattle. Or the "hand-painted antique ceramic doll-head planters"
sold under the name Clayflower22 by a retired schoolteacher near Las
Cruces, N.M. Or the "Kaleidoscope Pearberry Soapsicle" ($5), made by a
woman in Daytona Beach, Fla., who calls her shop Simply Soaps. Or a
porcelain bowl with an image of a skull on it, from a Chicago couple
who call themselves Circa Ceramics. Or an original painting from an
artist in Athens, Ga., who goes by the moniker the Black Apple.

Browsing
Etsy is both exhilarating and exhausting. There is enough here to mount
an astonishing museum exhibition. There is also plenty of junk. Most of
all there is a dizzying amount of stuff, and it is similarly
difficult to figure out how to characterize what it all represents: an
art movement, a craft phenomenon or shopping trend. Whatever this is,
it’s not something that Etsy created but rather something that it is
trying to make bigger, more visible and more accessible — partly by
mixing high-minded ideas about consumer responsibility with the
unsentimental notion of the profit motive.

On July 29, Etsy registered its one-millionth sale and is expecting to hit
two million items sold by mid-December. Shoppers spent $4.3 million buying
300,000 items from the site’s sellers in November alone — a 43 percent
increase over the previous month. Thus far in December, the site has had record-breaking
sales every day. Only about two years old, the company is not currently profitable
but is somewhat unusual among Internet-based start-ups of the so-called Web
2.0 era in having a model that does not depend on advertising revenue. It depends
on people buying things, in a manner that the founders position as a throwback
to the way consumption ought to be: individuals buying from other individuals. "Our
ties to the local and human sources of our goods have been lost," the
Handmade Pledge site asserts. "Buying handmade helps us reconnect." The
idea is a digital-age version of artisanal culture — that the future of
shopping is all about the past. [read on...]

The charity's mission is to provide a means of learning,
self-expression and exploration to the nearly 2 billion children of the
developing world with little or no access to education. They look to
provide a laptop to help connect and educate children...so what could
be better then that??

Well.. how about also getting a one of a kind signed 11" x 14" color
photo from one of America's most sought after photographers for just a
$500 donation (aka.. a tax deduction).. ??

Actually it's a $400 donation and for $100, and you'll get a signed photo.

FYI.. a typical editioned Catherine Opie photo of this print size would sell easily for over $3,000 in a gallery...plus these are all unique! Not bad! Here's more on Catherine Opie.

So Catherine Opie
created a project of 100 images where she took photo's (both landscapes
and portraits) of the artist's neighborhood of Los Angles and Three
Rivers as a backdrop for the OLPC laptop.

Dr. Quiz and I saw a few examples of the photo's at the Luminaire Studio during Art Basel.. they were all pretty cool.

So, the only catch is you can't choose your exact image.. it's a surprise which one you'll get.

First, you just have to register at this website.. and then you can make your $500 donation here,
and you'll get your unique 11"X14" Catherine Opie photo. Then they send
you an invoice.. your pay, and they send you the package with the Opie
Photo.

For those having trouble with the Luminaire Site.. Just call or contact :

Fashion
is a relative newcomer to the reputable Metropolitan, but now the Upper
East Side institution is stepping into the fracas of the fashion
blogosphere. The museum is displaying 40 new acquisitions from its
Costume Institute in blog.mode: addressing fashion, and — hold onto your chapeau — inviting the public to comment on the pieces through a blog on its website. While the armchair fug-sters
do battle for most catty remark, the Met's sincere curators intersperse
relevant art-historical commentary about such highlights as a 1983
black Comme des Garçons jersey dress and a 1947 Adrian piece featuring
a Salvador Dalí design. While the high-class items are undoubtedly
worthy of the Met's collection, it's the public dialogue that merits
close scrutiny.

– H.G. Masters

via Artnet news, 12/19/07:

MET GETS INTO BLOG MODE
While the average citizen "might shy away from commenting on the merits of a Juan Gris or a Henry Moore," notes Metropolitan Museum Fashion Institute curator Harold Koda, they have no such compunction when it comes to fashion. Thus, the Met’s first blog -- located at http://blog.metmuseum.org/blogmode/ --
invites the public to comment on the new exhibition in the Costume
Institute galleries, a presentation of 65 recent acquisitions dubbed
"blog.mode: addressing fashion," Dec. 18, 2007-Apr. 13, 2008. Comments
can be registered at the Met's website, or on what is called a
"blogbar" of eight computer terminals in the museum galleries. So far,
remarks seem to be confined to "fabulous" and the like, though one
contributor notes that 99 percent of the costumes in the show are for
women, "reinforcing the idea that women are the peacocks and men should
be looking on or not seen at all."

One of the many interesting items in the exhibition is the "Remote Control" Dress (2000) by Hussein Chalayan (b. 1970), a cast-plastic form with side and rear flaps that open to reveal pink tulle. According to Met curator Andrew Bolton,
who co-organized the show, Chalayan is one of several contemporary
designers who is beginning to issue his designs in limited editions in
order to encourage collectors.

The more modest materials of artistic practice occasionally come
under the purview of the artist and are elevated to the status of art.
In the 70s, when Rauschenberg was short on materials, having just moved
from New York to a small island near Florida, he looked around his
studio and saw the clutter of packing supplies and other detritus. He
took immediately to what was at hand, and the Cardboards, a series of works made from simple cardboard boxes, were born.

New York artist Ivin Ballen was also struck with a similar
revelation: while transporting several of his earlier works across
country, he looked in the back of his car and found the works, wrapped
in plastic and cardboard, transformed.

Ballen set about investigating this new vision, and while his
paintings are immediately reminiscent of those shocking Duchampian
works of Raschenberg, they are anything but ready-made. Ballen's
process involves building a maquette from humble materials, casting
them in fiberglass or resin, and painting them with trump l'oeil finish.

At first glance the effect is convincing, and without close scrutiny
the objects appear to resemble so much contemporary art (see:
Unmonumental at The New Museum) with their wacky assemblage
construction. Upon inspection the paintings reveal elements of their
process. "Tape" impresses rather than exudes, depths become
protrusions, and the whole is a negative of its model. This reversal is
characteristic of Ballen's work—here the ready-made is actually the
constructed—and more Étant Donnés than Fountain.

Ballen
has an loving relationship with the mimetic properties of his objects
but isn't content to merely copy the surfaces of his models. Grape Mine,
a vaguely H-shaped work, has a perspectival painting of two crossing L
beams on one of its barrel shaped protrusions. The image raises the
epistemic question of which representation is closer to reality: that
of the painted beams, or the sculptural elements that imitate the
objects from which they are cast.

Both are an illusion, of course, but Ballen deftly suspends his
paintings in the interplay between the reality of the object and its
image. These works may be anything but ready-made, but they represent
the ready-made by quotation. They function as a comment on the
tradition of appropriation; do we really perceive the object (a urinal)
or do we see the veneer (Fountain), which is art?

Further fluctuating this distinction, is the work Speakers (2-way).
This sound hybrid piece produces a sort of feed-back loop, which grabs
sounds from outside, themselves a sort of ready made, and projects them
into the gallery space to a transformative effect. The music alters the
environment of the gallery, which in turn alters the work.

The alteration that Ballen first saw, that of his art transformed by
packaging, is a reminder that what masks a thing may be more powerful
than what is beneath. 50/50 is a show that examines the porous
boundary between perception and artifice, producing a number of
fine distinctions along the way.